Monday, 20 December 2010

Another meeting of the Israeli ALT.NET group took place today. This session was divided into 5 parts of 20-30 minutes each describing a specific tool.

Raven DB

The first tool was presented by Oren Eini (aka Ayende), which demonstrated Raven DB - a none SQL DB. I wont say much about the tool there’s more than enough info to be found here. The session however was hilarious. During Oren talk the technical devil decided to unleash havoc. it started when the projector started to flicker unexplainably causing the viewers a mild headache. trying to reconnect the laptop change the cable didn’t work, Until at last a new projector was brought.However, at the offices the projector screen is wired to fold when the main projector is shut down, which of course was not a good thing, so we ended up with this:

if your wondering what you see, its one projector projecting a big empty dos window on top a second projector was showing the real image.

(Ayende also tried in parallel to install raven db on the main room pc however he decided to let it go when he found that the machine didn’t have .net framework installed).

I just glad that my laptop was not having those issues.

Crap4Net (and some custom MSbuild tasks)

In the second part I showed the Crap4Net tool. In short Crap is a metric combining into a single number complexity of code and unit test coverage. The idea is to give some indication on where you as a developer should spend your time in improving/cleaning your system. The MSbuild tasks part is just a side effect. but these custom tasks are aimed at people using the MSTest framework improving the integration with the build server and contains several useful tasks like running all tests in solution, converting MSTest coverage report into xml (and some xsl that will produce nice html’s) and some more.

Advanced Resharper

Next came Igal and explained some advanced ability of the Resharper. Since I’m a CodeRush user it was less relevant for me. but towards the end Igal has showed that Resharper has a debug mode that can be activated inside the VS IDE and has lots of hidden features. for more info go to Igal blog post.

Rapid-Dev

in the next part Dror has demoed the Rapid-Dev tool we have been working on. For those who are interested the Tool can be found here. and its dedicated blog here.

NHibernate – Getting started

In the Last session Ariel demoed in 15-20 minutes how to get up and running with a trivial save/load application with NHibernate. A wonderful talk for those just starting to work with NHibernate. More details (with code) here